Victimization of high performers: The roles of envy and work group identification.

Abstract

Drawing from victim precipitation, social comparison, and identity theories, this study develops and tests an integrative model of the victimization of high-performing employees. We examine envy as an explanatory mechanism of the victimization of high performers from fellow group members and propose work group identification as a moderator of this envy mechanism. Study 1, in a sample of 4,874 university staff employees in 339 work groups, supports the proposition that high performers are more likely to be targets of victimization. In Study 2, multisource data collected at 2 time points (217 employees in 67 work groups in 3 organizations), supports the proposition that high performers are more likely to be targets of victimization because of fellow group members' envy, and work group identification mitigates the mediated relationship.

You don’t actually want to get closer to the star: How LMX leads to workplace ostracism

“…Research has shown that envy has been deemed to have the power to profoundly affect interpersonal relationships, creating conflict that can manifest as violence and aggression (Vecchio, 2000;Thompson et al, 2016). Previous research has supported the notion that an envious person may harm the envied person, which negatively alters the envied person's better outcomes (Kim & Glomb, 2014).…”

“…Envy, which is an affective manifestation of lowered self-evaluation, may act as a kind of negative state reacting to falling short of others in attaining desirable outcomes following unfavorable upward comparison (Schaubroeck & Lam, 2004;Kim & Glomb, 2014). Individuals' emotion of envy is conceptualized in three related ways.…”

“…Second, we measured the emotion of envy in other team members using only one item due to the network measure design suggested by previous studies (Kim & Glomb, 2014). This operationalization of envy largely reduced raters' fatigue as they had to rate several team members, but potentially led to decreased reliability.…”

“…Being envied by other team members was measured using in-degree envy centrality as described by Kim and Glomb (2014). We adopted the network measure scale and each respondent was asked to evaluate his/her perceived envy toward each one of the other team members with one item: "I envy this person's leader-member exchange relationship.…”

HR practice, organisational commitment & citizenship behaviour

“…HR is primarily concerned with the management of employees within organisations, focusing on policies and on systems, to for instance, encounter victimisation (Kim and Glomb, 2014) or abusive supervision (Tepper, Moss, and Duffy, 2011). HR departments in organisations characteristically undertake a number of people related activities, including employee recruitment, training and development, performance appraisal, employee benefits designing, and rewarding (e.g., managing pay and benefit systems).…”